#185: Vanishing Borders: When Kids Crash the Video Call
Last week, I had a ZOOM session with my former teaching assistant from my Australia study abroad program. She was collecting data for her dissertation by interviewing me regarding my views on global citizenship. As we were deep in discussion about this topic, she noticed (in the corner of my screen) the foreign currency I had collected over the years that were hanging on my wall... bills from different countries I had traveled to. This then led to richer ideas and other meaningful and personal experiences to be shared. I think perhaps this was a microcosm - that sometimes it's not worth worrying about creating a professional background such as a white wall or perfect shelf of books to symbolize one's life. Pip's piece illuminates the beauty of letting one's true character show through all the little nuances in their world, and truly appreciating them.
- Amanda
VANISHING BORDERS: WHEN KIDS CRASH THE VIDEO CALL
CLARK KENT OR SUPERMAN?
“Children should be seen, not heard.” – proverb.
Pip Coburn
I am sharing with the group only the “lead-in” and the “lead-out” of a note that speaks to one of the things that might happen with all of the remote working in the extraordinary crisis of the moment…
A few years ago, in Park City, Utah, near the completion of a two-day gathering we call Road Makers, Rob Rose said that it was so nice and valuable to have a space he could show up not as a superhero—which is often required at business gatherings—but, instead, as his alter ego Clark Kent.
Way back in the 1990s, a family friend switched jobs.
He moved “up” to one of the real investment banking heavyweights of the day. Somewhere into maybe his third week on the job, the family phone rang at about 7pm and his eight-year-old son answered. This was in the days of landline family phones that might hang on the kitchen wall and parents for many reasons might encourage their young kids to answer the phone. Skill development perhaps. And, who knows, it might be grandma! At any rate, instead, it was one of the senior partners at this heavyweight investment banking firm. There was some after-hours work to do on a pending deal. Very reasonable in itself, given the job. So the eight-year-old son handed the phone to his dad to take over and do some business.
The following day the senior partner pulled him aside:
“We would really prefer that your kids don’t answer your phone in case it happens to be a client.”
Our family friend probably stayed there another maybe eight months. This was too much.
My read: it would be easy to consider that the senior partner was impinging on the borders of work and non-work. But that isn’t what I hear first. What I hear is that the senior partner had been trained to put on a façade of what “professionalism” looked like (relative to the immense fees they charged!) and “professionalism” most certainly did NOT include an eight-year-old accidentally talking to a client, even if it was the home family phone at 7pm on a school night. Business people were not meant to show their real lives. It might seem sloppy or disrespectful or clueless or casual or something even more dreadful…
…as you might imagine that firm was also one of the last to allow for casual Fridays or being in the office without a tie on.
Pretense masquerading as “professionalism."
Someone asked me what my working definition of “professionalism” was in situations when that word might lead us stray: what came to me at that moment were the words:
Professionalism gone awry means “please don’t reveal your soul.”
In these days ahead, for better or worse, organizations and their ecosystems will learn of the behind-the-façade, real lives of their people. That might include, egads, perhaps a dog or a cat, or an eight-year-old. While many elements of this moment will recede after the window of crisis closes, I suspect strongly that the best organizational ecosystems will use this awful crisis and the consequent universal experience of working at home with well-functioning video to get to know their colleagues across the entire organizational eco-system in very human soul-filled ways. Ways that will never be put back in the bottle. I think this will largely be a super-accelerant of what we started calling “Humanity in Business” about 8-10 years ago. Some companies will take advantage of this opportunity to create far more open and trustable human relationships, others will wish and pretend they never saw anything!
BTW… I am thrilled to now know a friend in the UK who makes beer in his shed – the shed that now also doubles as his office for researching stocks – and he is dropping liters of beer on his neighbors’ doorsteps to provide some cheer to modestly counter the extreme stress all around…
A few years back when Brynne and I amped up video work with clients we thought about our backdrops, which would appear behind us. Did they look soul-less enough to qualify for “professionalism”? Gosh, I hoped not. We did have rules for ourselves but not many. Brynne suggested, for instance, that eating on video during a meeting with clients wasn’t so cool. Got it. Nonetheless, before long many clients were meeting my daughter Bailey who has special needs, as she sometimes doesn’t quite “get” what a “business call” means. And before long Brynne’s dog, Augustus, would make auditory interludes (fancy words for barking). So this week, when on one video session three dogs appeared on screen, I suggested that I thought that Brynne may have invented “that."
If we might want to go full circle…
If humans didn’t often treat one another rather poorly in the name of “business," we wouldn’t have thought to offer the phrase “Humanity in Business” in the first place! There would have been no need.
It is more likely that humans in your organizational ecosystem appear as their Clark Kent alter egos, as opposed to always polished and shiny and “professional” Superman figurines—especially as we more openly see each other as more human and bring greater compassion to one another in business. From THAT space humans will work to make sure others are getting what might support one another’s well-being. That will be a big part of what will constitute an effective organizational culture in the new world.
“A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.” - Aristotle